I also added characters who are wholly fictional: Stick Woman and her assistant Bahauk, Yasi’s brothers and sisters (although she doubtless had siblings), and Ananda’s two boy-monk friends. Although Stick Woman is fictional, I created her in view of contemporary studies that claim women shamans were more common than formerly believed. The Sakyan clan did have relationships with the hill tribes of Northern India, although very few specifics are known, and the Gorge tribe, while fictional, is loosely based on the Khond people who may have resided in the hills near where Yasodhara grew up and reportedly practiced human sacrifice.
In some stories, I mix fact with fiction. Rahula is portrayed consistently in the texts, but the exact time and cause of his death are unknown. The texts agree, however, that he died relatively young and definitely before his father. His death in the novel from malaria is fictional, but entirely possible. Many of the novel’s scenes between the Buddha and Ananda are told in the scriptures, including Ananda’s attempt to persuade the Buddha to ordain women, the Buddha admonishing him for worrying about the Buddha’s health, Ananda grieving over Sariputta’s death, and Ananda expressing concern for the Sangha’s future. The orders and advice the Buddha gives shortly before his death are almost all direct from scripture, including the famous quote, “Be a light unto yourselves.”
Regrettably, some of Devadatta’s sexist remarks in this novel were actually spoken in the texts by the Buddha. It’s my (and not only my) belief that these attributions, which seem to contradict other statements, could be the result of later redactions and reflect misogynist inclinations in Sangha leadership, a backlash against the Buddha’s allowing women to practice more or less equally with men. When feasible, I have Yasi/Ananda refer to Devadatta’s remarks as wrongfully attributed to the Buddha by Devadatta’s camp in an effort to make its bigoted views respectable. On the other hand, the sexist and self-serving speeches of Mahakassapa (Kassapa), as quoted or paraphrased in the novel, belong to him and him alone. Although the tradition respects him as the First Patriarch of the Sangha, some modern evaluations of his characters are considerably more negative. I didn’t wish to make him and out-and-out villain—he was a man of his time—but I let the readers form their own judgments. As for his and the Council’s interrogation of Ananda, this also appears in the Pali texts, with the same basic questions and replies as in the novel, although I do take some liberties with Ananda’s replies, making them more qualified.
The facts around the Buddha’s death are much debated. Lately, many scholars have concluded that he died of dysentery complicated by an intestinal aneurysm, as he does in the novel. But the stories about the Buddha being poisoned persist. My depiction of the Buddha’s last meal comes from the Pali texts, where he tells Cunda to bury the “pigs’ delight” after he samples it. Stephen Bachelor has suggested that the intended victim was Ananda, whose extensive and intimate knowledge of the Buddha’s discourses was a threat to those who wished to distort them. Ananda’s visit in disguise to threaten Jagdish, whom (s)he fears was hired by Devadatta to kill the Buddha, is fiction. Ananda’s writing skills are also fictional, but when the nun in the epilogue describes his enlightenment, the quote she uses is directly from the Pali Canon.
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1 Thich Nhat Hanh speaking to a small group of students in 1988 about Old Path, White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991), recalled by the book’s editor, Arnie Kotler.
A Note on Language
The Buddha probably spoke a regional dialect called Ardhamāgadhā, or Māgadhī Prakrit. His teachings were transmitted orally for about four hundred years before being committed to writing in present-day Sri Lanka in the Pali language. I used the Pali names for most of the novel’s people and places, but because some Sanskrit words—namely, Dharma, karma, and Siddhartha—are already known to Western readers, I used them instead of their Pali equivalents.
Acknowledgments
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my teachers over the years, both spiritual and intellectual. I thank the many teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California, who instructed me in the Dharma, and especially Phillip Moffitt, whose wisdom over the past twenty years has informed my daily life as well as my writing. I am also grateful for the scholars and teachers whose work has inspired and informed me about the life and times of Yasodhara. (These include Karen Armstrong, Bhikkhu Ñanamoli, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Richard Gombrich, and many others.)
For helping me learn the craft of fiction, I thank my mentor James Frey, a great taskmaster as well as a good friend. I owe an equal debt to my critique group—Dorothy Edwards, Heather King, Max Tomlinson, and Eric Seder—for their incisive comments and the overall encouragement they gave me while writing this novel. I also am grateful to Jim Frey’s many students who helped me hone my skills during workshops over the years. Jan Gurley, thank you so much for reading my first draft. I also want to thank my agent, Arnie Kotler, for guiding me through the publication process, as well as for his excellent editing of my final draft.
Thanks also to Paul Cohen, founder of Monkfish Book Publishing Company, for organizing his talented staff to produce Bride of the Buddha: Susan Piperato for her meticulous final edits, Lisa Carta for her beautiful cover design, and Colin Rolfe for his overall creation of an elegant final product. And finally, I thank LuAnn Ostergaard for her original painting, which Lisa used to such great effect.
Most of all, I am grateful to my wonderful husband, Bill Coffin, without whose support—emotional, financial, and technical—this book never would have been possible.
About the Author
Barbara McHugh is a published poet with many years of experience editing fiction, newsletters, and technical documents. She has a Master of Arts in English literature from New York University and a PhD in religion and literature from the University of California at Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. A Buddhist practitioner for more than twenty years, she teaches courses in Buddhism and coleads a meditation group with her husband, William Coffin, a drummer and computer scientist. She is also on the board of directors of the Marin Sangha, founded by Phillip Moffitt, author and a guiding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She lives with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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